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February 25, 2009 - IGN Movies had the opportunity this week to chat one-on-one with director Alex Proyas about his new film Knowing, an action-thriller of global proportions about a professor (Nicolas Cage) who stumbles on terrifying predictions about the futureand sets out to prevent them from coming true.

In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule's contents and the girl's cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler. But it is Caleb's father, professor John Koestler (Cage), who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years.

As John further unravels the document's chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells three additional eventsthe last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve John and his son. When John's attempts to alert the authorities fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon himself to try to prevent more destruction from taking place.

With the reluctant help of Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne) and Abby Wayland, the daughter and granddaughter of the now-deceased author of the prophecies, John's increasingly desperate efforts take him on a heart-pounding race against time until he finds himself facing the ultimate disasterand the ultimate sacrifice.


With Knowing, Proyas hopes he's crafted "a film that's fairly rich with ideas and philosophical thought. I certainly tried to make it so.

But Nic's character's arc is he believes the universe functions in a random fashion. Apart from the fact that he's a man of science, he's had a great tragedy happen in his life and as a result of that he believes there is no guiding principle. There is no structure. It's all just random and (expletive) just happens, basically. And through the course of the movie, he's confronted with a situation where he realizes there is structure. The numbers predict events accurately and those events occur; it's almost like it's a preordained structure. So it's a somewhat spiritual quest that he embarks upon in the construct of this escalating set of circumstances that happen."

Proyas also sees the movie as being about "the hope we pass down to our children in the cycle of life. The central core relationship of the movie is between Nic and his son, but Nic has a very difficult relationship with his father as well. The movie became more and more to me about fathers and sons. The good things we pass down to our heirs and also some of the bad stuff as well. Nic's relationship with his son is one of growing understanding. They start off in a place where Nic's character is treading water and the relationship is somewhat by the numbers, and at a certain point he realizes his son's a lot more mature than he at first thinks."

The Dark City and I, Robot director was initially hooked by the script's story device of the time capsule, which he explained has "this kind of odd urban myth quality to it. That someone could have put predictions in a time capsule 50 years ago that have accurately hit the mark of each one of these events that have happened, therefore proving its accuracy with further predictions to come. That's certainly an intriguing, creepy notion: that someone had the ability to do that and send off this message. Then really it's about what we do with that knowledge. That to me is really the core of the movie. If you have that information, what do you do with it? Can you affect these events, or are these events going to happen regardless of what you try to do with that information? If they happen regardless of your intervention, what is the purpose of having that information? Why has this information been passed down to you? What does it mean? Can it affect anything? That is the crux of the story and the second part of what I said if you have that information what do you then do with that knowledge? that really shapes the whole second and third acts of the film."

Proyas says this seemingly simple story construct of the time capsule "brought out all these intriguing philosophical ideas, and as we dug further into this idea we found more gold, more stuff coming out of it. That's when I get excited about a movie. If I'm going to spend two years of my life telling a story, I want it to have a richness of ideas so that when I dig I find more stuff. This one really had that and hopefully people will see that stuff come through as the story evolves in the final film."